A more elegant philosophy, for a more civilized age...

[Le Pere Duchesne]

Ok, so what does the mauled star wars line have to do with anything? nothing really, but it was the best title I could think of. nto the actual topic:

I live in australia. This probably doesn't mean anything to you, except a few will realise that I spell colour with a 'U', notice it there? and I spell 'jail' gaol. But the diferences in spelling have ne relevence to this guild so I shall skip right past them.
Living here, in the country which has the worst human rights record in regard to its native inhabitants, I still get the image that it is more civilised than the US. This is not a jab at the US from the outside, this is the image I get from talking to people on the net, from people I know who come from the US, people I know who have just moved to the US and people who have been to the US. The biggest factor is the treatment that Atheists get (also how communists are recieved as well, but that isn't directly bearing on either this guild or thread).
Here, atheists considered normal people. It wasn't untill year 12 (in 2005, ugh, it makes me feel old...) that I heard a teacher tell me about feeling pressured to not teach evolution... I knew that such pressure existed in the US, but here? It was such a shock, but I guess to you the shock would be that there was a lack of pressure in the first place.

I guess my point is, I would like to know, what is it like, as an atheist, living in the largest bastion of reaction in the world? Please remember that I have not been to your country, and so assume I know nothing about your conditions or any mildly famous fanatics.  

[CaprinaePsi]

In regards to communism; WW2 happened. After that, just saying that communism in anyway is good can profile you as unpatriotic, and here patriotism is high up there.

As for how it's like to be atheist; I'm not sure. Religious discussion doesn't occur much around me, and the few times I've said that I'm an atheist, I didn't get much flak. I haven't heard many people saying that they hate atheists, either, so I don't really know.  

[ProjectOmicron88]

It really depends a lot on where you are. This is a big country, and culture and attitudes differ greatly across it. I personally haven't gotten a whole lot of reaction for it, but then again, most people never really ask me, and I've never found a good reason to tell them.  

[Koravin]

In regards to native peoples, the US is just about as bad as Australia.

Well, I see other countries, like the UK, with their multiculturalism, and wonder about this 'melting pot' that I live in. I am 'other' in every respect, a minority in every category. Honestly, I don't know what it is to live life not feared and hated. I live in the midwest, just west of the Mississippi. For someone unfamiliar with US geography, that's in the central part of the continental US. It's actually not that far west, but it's part of a cultural region that's often conservative and uneducated. It's fairly blue collar.  

[Le Pere Duchesne]

Would you like to expand on what you have said?
(not to argue over who has the worst record vs natives, and knowing what horrible things were done the the various native peoples in the US and the rest of the Americas, in australia, we have this island called Tasmania, it is its own state because noone else wants it, and for good reason. There are no Aborigines living there who are related to any that lived there 200 years ago, because about a hundered years ago an army was lined up from coast to coast and walked along from one end to the other killing all the natives. At least in the US they /pretended/ there was a war.)  

[Koravin]

Well, the average life expectancy for Native Americans living on reservations is like 25 or something. The Lakota Sioux have pulled out of all the treaties they had with the US because of horrendous treatment. It's hard to get info on it, the media refuses to cover it.  

[Le Pere Duchesne]

Ouch... pretty harsh... Well, the life expectance seems worse than that of Aborigines, but info over here is easy to get, the problem is that the waters are so muddied because of 1: what the gov't says, and the immediate reaction is to disbelieve it, 2: the Aboriginal 'community leaders' who are now sucking up the gov'ts arse, now not... one never knows when to trust them, 3: nothing gets said by the people affected because 'they're covering it up' as the media would put it...
Right now there is a military intervention (the police as well as the actual army) into the Aboriginal settlements in the Northern Territory over some alleged 'child rape' cases, however, the interesting thing to note is that almost instantly, certain mining companies recieved rights to mine on the land of some of those settlements...

However, what did you mean by:

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I am 'other' in every respect, a minority in every category. Honestly, I don't know what it is to live life not feared and hated.

Seriously, the only people to suffer such in australia is the aboriginal population, of which I am not a part, so I do not know what you mean (I mean, I grasp it in an intellectual sense, but that is nothing more than aknowledging that it can happen, rather than knowing what it is like).  

[Dronning Dagmar]

I have to echo that it depends very greatly depending on where you are in the US. I grew up in the Bible Belt, and as I was not an atheist at the time, I don't have any good atheist anecdotes for you, but here's a sampling of the love and tolerance I was exposed to.

A troubled student started to excel in her class, and sang praises of her teacher to her parents. Learning became fun, and she looked forward to going to school for the first time in her life. Excited, the parents decided to meet the teacher. After a short, successful meeting at school, they invited the teacher and her husband over for dinner to get to know them better. When the white teacher arrived at the door with her black husband, they were told to leave. The parents removed their daughter from that class.

Certainly, not everyone in the Bible Belt or even in that town is like that, but after I moved to a slightly larger city in the northern US, I actually heard a naïve college classmate declare that racism no longer existed in America. I recounted the above story to my class to prove her wrong, and some people actually thought I was making this up.

I suspect that the experiences of atheists will differ widely across the country as well. My life as an atheist in America was spent in a major metropolitan area with large, strong communities of minorities. Not just atheists, but gays, neo-pagans, Latinos, Muslims, etc. etc. I never experienced anything negative just because of my atheism. If I were, for whatever reason, to return to my Bible Belt hometown, I assure you things would not be the same.  

[Le Pere Duchesne]

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I recounted the above story to my class to prove her wrong, and some people actually thought I was making this up.

Much like in my post above, I know this happens, but even more, I know that when I actually go to the US and I see stuff like this happen it will hit me harder that I can imagine.

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ï

Forgive my squirrilly ignorance, but how do you get the non-standard characters? I doubt you c/p, so how?

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I never experienced anything negative just because of my atheism.

Yeah, that's the problem, neither have I. Not that I want to, but I guess I just want to know what it is actually like from people who have been through such situations because as 'nice' as it is over here... It just doesn't seem real... My biggest problem is getting a job, and while that is a really big problem for me, I know it is nothing compared to what people cop just for being a minority, even in this country... Unless it's South Africa, in which case it is because you are the majority...  

[Sanguvixen]

I have to echo the same sentiments of the others.

How you get treated depends upon where you live in the U.S. If you live in a place where there are many minorities, it may or may not be easier to fit in, depending upon how the majority treats the minority.

I live in a place in America that is the backyard of Fundamentalists. Pat Robertson lives a few cities away. There are churches everywhere, which drives me nuts. We don't have that many people in my city, and yet we have huge problems with affordable housing. It is why it makes me sick seeing one building after another turned into a tax free church, so that a few people can make lots of money off of the faith of others.

That aside, I am a closet atheist when it comes to my family and when it comes to the community in general. I'm not ready to lose the support of my family over something so pathetic as belief or disbelief in personal gods.

I remember when I was working during the Summer, and I became good friends with a African American boy, who was still young in high school. One day the issue of aliens came up, and during the discussion I let slip that I don't believe in gods. He went from being friendly, to wanting little to do with me.

I point out his race, because African Americans sort of make white a minority in my area. A majority of African Americans are very religious, or at least make church a big part of their life. I know from an African American Atheist who happens to be either engaged or married to a white women, that it isn't well accepted within his race (African America) the idea of atheism.

In fact, it is easier for a white person to be atheist than a black one. If anyone is offending by my use of either "black" or "African American" oh well, I've tired of trying to please everyone when using one term makes one person happy and the other very mad.

Moving on, I see no reason to be open on my Atheism to my family, because my mother would sooner accept my brother as gay, than me as Atheist. She does not like Atheists, and my younger brother, who is 3 years younger than me, is viciously anti-atheist even though he doesn't even have a real reason. He hates them because...he doesn't understand them.

To be an Atheist in America is just as difficult to be any other misunderstood and commonly demonized minority. It can be just as easy too depending upon where you live and how you play your cards. Although I do not believe we are as much a minority as many of us think we are.

 

[Tenth Speed Writer]

It can vary just between the city and the country.

I live in an interesting town; the university in the middle of the city and the surrounding neighborhoods tend to be quite accepting. Most of the professors and middle class citizens are either passively (non-evangelically) religious, or outright humanist agnostic. As you move into the lower wealth, working class areas like where I live, the demographics shift suddenly. The makeup switches to a vast majority of african-americans (Something attributable to our position as the former "heart of dixie"), most of whom are quite fixed in their beliefs; this isn't anything major, as long as one doesn't become outright vocal about their own views. Living in as poor a situation as most of the people here, religion is the only thing in life that can some from day to day of poverty.

In and outside of the city, though, are the places that bother me most: The Suburbs.

Religious fervor lends itself just as much to the well-to-do here as it does the less fortunate. It lacks, however, even the positive aspects one would expect it to bring.

It disgusts me when the rich thank God for their wealth and blessings, and call it a "reward of faith," when not across the world, not in another town, but literally a mile down the road, there are those who pray with their same devotion and have to take on the world even to get fed. They spend the money given in donation each Sunday on needs within their own walls and charities around the world, but barely a fraction on those here at home. Yet, it's most often the same that go to these churches, that claim the poor are "lazy, uneducated, good-for-nothing leeches on the economy."
As if many of them have ever had to do without.
And those big churches, they don't even teach the moral lessons they should. The pastor doesn't have a congregation; he has an audience. He spends an hour rewording "Praise God!" as many ways as he can, but he never once takes a moment to say why. And they swallow it, feeling superior to the rest of the world, feeling like they've earned some glory simply because they came to church. And when one of them starts to think, "why am I given so much when I do so little good?", they simply tell them that "grace" is receiving that which they don't deserve, and that "good works," the very impact they should have on the world, are far from important, as if an "accessory" to what has amounted to no more than any religion before it.

Pardon... I'm going to cut this post short, before it turns to a full blown rant.  

[Dronning Dagmar]

Gracchvs

Quote:

ï

Forgive my squirrilly ignorance, but how do you get the non-standard characters? I doubt you c/p, so how?

I'm on a Mac. On the off-chance you are too, you hold down option+u for the ¨character, and then press the letter you want the ¨ to be on. opt+u,i = ï

I haven't used Windows in a long time, but I do remember that you hold down the alt key and press a bunch of numbers to get "non-standard" characters. What those numbers are, you just have to memorize. To confirm this is still true, I did some googling and I found this handy reference sheet for anyone interested in memorizing the ones they think they will want to use.

Said handy reference sheet also has more details about doing them on Mac or in HTML.

Anyway… I guess I shouldn't say I've never experienced anything negative, because I am not "out" to my parents as an atheist, but it's a lot more complicated than just about atheism. They don't know a lot of things about me. I think the atheism issue may come to light in the somewhat near future, since I'm having a baby later this year and it seems inevitable that my parents will want to talk about how to raise it. Still, I am not expecting to be disowned or anything like that. They're just not going to like it.

In Denmark, I experience more prejudice from being a stay-at-home wife than from being an atheist.  

[lizzah]

It's really depressing, actually. Like, massively.

The amount of bullshit, bad policy and un-Christian behavior that is justified "in the name of God" in this country is sickening, to be honest.

The worst is the way it's so infused with politics. People are lied to, misled, deceived and manipulated against their best interests by politicians feigning religiosity.

And they buy it - they'll vote for someone who will enact policies that make their lives strictly worse, just because he/she claims to be a Christian - I guess because, and part of me hates to say this, once you stop thinking enough to believe, you're easy to dupe and blind to misuse.

And the worst part is, that feigned religiosity has become an effective requirement for being elected to office, so it's not like fresh candidates will clean things out.

Sigh.  

[Le Pere Duchesne]

Dagmar: If I knew how to make cookie smilies on gaia you would get a million!

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And the worst part is, that feigned religiosity has become an effective requirement for being elected to office, so it's not like fresh candidates will clean things out.

I guess my only reply to that post, and to the bit I quoted in particular would be the following:

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To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions.

 

[Xiporah]

As far as I know, the south eastern US tends to be the most religious. Fun to visit. Wouldn't live there.

I've gotten everything from gasps to shrugs (indifferent and 'whatever-you're-an-idiot' shrugs) when I mention that I am an atheist in my area.